Paul Wehage

Biography, Part 1

Early Studies and performances

Paul Wehage was born in Grand Forks, ND USA on April 2, 1963. After moving several times, his family settled in Burnsville, Minnesota where he began his musical studies at age eight in his elementary school band. At the age of fourteen, he began studying privately with Ruben Haugen, a former student of Marcel Mule who gave him a very firm introduction to the classical technique and repertoire.

After moving to San Antonio, Texas at the age of sixteen, he studied with John L. Buccanan and later with Harvey Pittel. He made his orchestral Debut with the San Antonio Symphony at the age of 17 after winning the Symphony Young Artists competition. During the period between the age of 17 and 23, Paul Wehage won several other National and International Young Artist competitions, including the Hemphill-Weills Sorantin Award of the San Angelo Symphony, The First prize in Orchestral Instruments at the Midland-Oddessa Competition, and the First Prize in Orchestral Instruments at the Kingsville Music Competition.

During his studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Paul Wehage continued to study the saxophone with Harvey Pittel, but also harmony, theory and analysis with Jeffrey Stolet, Music History and Analysis with Dr. Elliot Antokoletz, orchestration with Dr. Donald Grantham, and performed in ensembles directed by Dr. Dan Welcher and Dr. Thomas Lee and in addition performed student works by composers such as Peter Terry, Jeffrey Stolet and Edmond J. Campion who have gone on to become major composers in the United States.. It was this rich and varied experience coupled with interaction with other instrumentalists which made Paul Wehage look beyond the confines of the Saxophone and into the world of Music in general.

The Paris Conservatory

After graduating with honors from the University of Texas at Austin in 1985 (B. Mus. Applied Saxophone), the young musician decided to take the entrance exams at the Conservatoire Nationale de Musique de Paris where he entered the Saxophone Class Sas one of two foreign candidates in the Fall of 1985, studying saxophone with Daniel Deffayet, solfège with Thérèse Brënet and Analysis with Alain Margoni-under whose training he received an Instrumental Analysis Diploma with High Honors in 1989.

His years at the Paris Conservatory were not happy, due to frustration with what Wehage considered to be substandard repertoire as well as his passionate, expressive performance style which had been such a success in the United States and which was not considered to be quite right for the strict standards of Daniel Deffayet’s class, with whom Paul Wehage was in frequent conflict. His first attempt at the Prize examination in 1988 was not a success, ironically due to his interpretation of Antoine Tisné’s « Espaces Irradiées » which was widely criticized as being unstylistic. His second attempt (which was his first year as the student of Claude Delangle, who replaced Deffayet in the Fall of 1988) was better received but only rewarded with a second prize due to his performance of Peter Terry’s work « Spiderkiss », also judged as being unstylistic. Finally, in 1990, he received his First Prize with a performance of Karl Husa’s « Concerto » in a heavily split jury which was headed by Betsy Jolas.

Renée Mazella

During his first year at the Paris Conservatory, Paul Wehage began private studies with his neighbor in Montmartre, the noted French Soprano Renata Mazella who had a long career in South America. Madame Mazella forced him to completely rethink his approach to sound production, breathing, repertoire and concert presentation. Her training, which was inspired both by yogic thinking and classical vocal technique, gave Wehage a new technical ease as well as ideas about musicality and interpretation which allowed him to again look beyond the world of the Saxophone.

Her ideas about the French music of the beginning of the Century (Ibert, Honneger, Debussy, Ravel, Chabrier) lead Wehage to research this repertoire in greater detail, secure in the knowledge base that he had acquired from this first-hand source (Mazella had worked directly with Jacques Ibert, Darius Milhaud among others and had knowledge of Debussy and Ravel from her own teachers and other colleagues). It was this training which lead to Wehage’s selection by Lord Yehudi Menuhin for his « Live Music Now » programme in France in 1990 and also allowed him to approach his first commercial recording project, an album of twenty-four « Morceaux de Genre », which included his first exposure to the music of Rudy Wiedoeft, which was released by EPM in 1990.

After Wehage ended his formal education, his work took on a series of parallel directions which evolved at approximately the same time.

Jean Françaix

It was Renata Mazella who gave Wehage a letter of introduction to the composer Jean Françaix, whose works she had performed in South America. She thought that Françaix’s « L’Horloge de Flore » would make a wonderful vehicle for Wehage’s lyric tone on the soprano saxophone. After an initial meeting at the fondation Singer-Polignac, during December of 1991, Françaix asked Wehage to prepare the work for a working rehearsal and was so enthused that Françaix himself insisted that it be premièred at his Eightieth Birthday Concert at the Flâneries Musicales de Reim in August 1992, with the Orchestre de Bretagne under the direction of the composer (which was also documented in an unreleased recording, the only existing recording of the composer conducting this work).

After this initial success, Françaix asked Wehage to work with the director of a small opera company in Paris to produce a chamber Opera production of « L’Apostrophe » a work which Françaix adapted for Wehage’s Saxophone Quartet. The work ran for two months during November/December 1995 coupled with Wehage’s own arrangement of Offenbach’s « La Bonne D’Enfant » for the same forces. The production toured the Thüringen of Germany during the 1996 Via Régia Festival.

Impressed with Wehage’s virtuosity and ease with French music, Françaix adapted two other works for Paul Wehage, including the « Prelude, Sarabande and Gigue » for Soprano Saxophone and Piano and the « Tema Con Variazione » for Alto Saxophone and Piano or String Orchestra. Finally, Wehage asked Jean Françaix to compose a song cycle for an upcoming tour of Japan with the French baritone Philippe de Gaetz and the Japanese Pianist Moyuru Maeda. The work « Huit Historiettes de Tallemant des Réaux » for Baritone, Tenor Saxophone and Piano, was Françaix’s last completed work and was premièred in May, 1996 in Paris in the presence of the composer, shortly before his sudden illness and death.

Moyuru Maeda and Jean Françaix in rehearsal

American Music

During 1989, Wehage began to explore a way of expressing his identity as an American Musician living abroad though an American Music Ensemble of Voice, Saxophone and Piano, initially named the Paris/Texas Ensemble which performed works by Scott Joplin, Charles Ives, Rudy Weideoft, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Aaron Copeland, Leonard Bernstein and also works by living American composers such as Gloria Coates, Kate Waring, Libby Larsen, Peter Terry and others. The Ensemble had an initial success with engagements at the Théâtre de la Ville de Paris, the Sophia Antipolis Foundation and a number of festivals in France. They were subsequently invited to tour the Baltic States during 1991 and 1992 (The Arsenals Festival of Cinema in Riga, Latvia, notably) and engaged for a series of concerts with the Jeunesses Musicales de France and also for the first American festival in Thürigen at the Euraisches Kulturzentrum in Thüringen, Erfurt Germany during 1992.

During the years between 1990-1999, the Ensemble in various forms performed for American Music concerts for the USIS and other organizations in France, Belgium, Germany, Holland and Azerbaïdjan.

Paul Wehage at a School Concert in Eastern Germany in 1996

The works for Cello Octet

In 1991, Paul Wehage performed for the first time with the French Cello Octet « Tempo Di Cello » with whom he premièred a series of works for Saxophone and Cello Octet, including Alexandre Rudajev’s « Variations et Thème » which was recorded on CD with the Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano and other works for Cello on the 18/25 label, Gian-Paolo Chiti’s Concertino for Tenor Saxophone and Cello Octet (recorded by Radio France at a concert in Nice in 1994), Joelle Wallach’s « Sweet Briar Elégies » and other works.

Engagements with the Tempo di Cello Ensemble, which subsequently became the ensemble L’Octuor de Violoncelles, included the Festival La Quinzaine de Violoncelles de Montréal, the Fondation Vasarely in Aix-en-Provence, the fondation Sophia Antipolis in Valbonne, le Midem Festival in 1994 and the first three éditions of the Recontres des Ensembles de Violoncelles in Beauvais, France between 1993-1995.

For Part 2, click here